Cascading impacts of forest disturbances: spatial spillovers in regular harvesting across Austrian forest districts (2000–2024)

Managed forest regions are increasingly exposed to disturbance regimes that generate cascading impacts beyond directly affected areas. In Austria, disturbance events trigger salvage logging that can disrupt regular harvesting and spill over across space through operational and institutional factors, yet such cross-district dynamics are rarely quantified as a systemic resilience problem. Here we assess systemic resilience in Austria’s district-level forestry system by measuring how regular harvesting responds to salvage “shocks” within affected districts and their spatial neighbors.

Using annual harvest reports for Austrian forest districts from 2000–2024, we use the amount of salvage timber as a measure of disturbance severity. We label years with unusually high salvage volumes as “hotspot” years, based on percentile thresholds. We then compare how regular harvesting deviates from its baseline in (i) hotspot districts and (ii) neighboring districts that share a border, capturing indirect and cascading effects beyond the directly affected area. To examine institutional heterogeneity, we analyze responses by forest ownership type (small private, large private, and public forests) and track trajectories in the years following hotspot events.

We find strong disruptions in regular harvesting in hotspot districts, together with clear spillover responses in neighboring districts. Recovery after hotspot events differs systematically across ownership types. We interpret changes in regular harvesting as an indicator of systemic resilience, capturing (i) resistance (how strongly harvesting is disrupted), (ii) recovery (how quickly harvesting returns toward baseline), and (iii) spillovers (how impacts extend to neighboring districts). These results show that disturbance impacts and recovery in forestry are spatially connected and institution-dependent, suggesting that post-disturbance planning should consider effects beyond the directly affected districts.